NYLPI’s McGregor Smyth Speaks At Yale Law School

NYLPI’s McGregor Smyth Speaks At Yale Law School

NYLPI Executive Director McGregor Smyth spoke on a panel at Yale Law school on Friday, as part of the Liman Public Interest Colloquium. The title of the panel was “The Relationship of Funders and the Academy to Institutionalizing Law School Engagement.”

The problems of poor people in courts came to the fore a half century ago, as individuals and groups claimed a host of new rights — to habitable housing, government benefits, and fair treatment. Courts and legislatures responded by protecting entitlements for tenants, recipients of federal benefits, and individuals harmed by discrimination.

In addition to recognizing new rights, courts honed in on the need to equip individuals when in conflict with the state. As a result, legal mandates insisted that, in some cases, states provide lawyers, waive fees, and give subsidies for transcripts and experts. Congress created fee-shifting to encourage the pursuit of civil rights claims, and both legislatures and courts shaped class actions and other forms of aggregation to permit cost-sharing among litigants and to provide incentives for lawyers to represent groups.

Today, new data are emerging about the poverty of people in courts, the individuals who are priced out of courts, the underfunding of the legal system, and the enormous burdens of court fees, fines, and bail.

In March, the Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law, joined by the Policy Advocacy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley and the Fines and Fees Justice Center, focused on these challenges at the 22nd annual Liman Center Colloquium, Economic Injustice: Courts, Law Schools, and Institutionalizing Reforms, and in the companion publication, Ability to Pay. The Colloquium and the volume Ability to Pay aim to bring the economics of court services and the needs of courts and litigants into the mainstream of legal education.